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Monday, May 4, 2015

"In" and "Of"

You have friends or family or a husband or a wife or a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a dog or...someone else you need to keep close to; someone else you need to care for; someone else you need to help to be happy; someone else you need to debate about life and laugh about life with. Every waking hour of your day is not enough to do enough to keep the dynamics between you and them strong; to maintain a connection that nourishes your collective souls, hearts and minds.

You live in a house or an apartment -- a world of your own, built by you and maintained by you. You need to clean the carpets and wipe the counters and replace the light bulbs, but you also need to perpetuate an atmosphere of positivity, partnership and love between those walls...the walls that you have to paint once in awhile. Castle or prison -- it's up to you. It's all up to you. So much is just up to you...

You have an auto-pilot muscle running your body, and that muscle is getting older, as are all of the other ones from toes to forehead. You need to eat well, which requires shopping, planning and thinking. Then, cooking. You need to move so that when you are seventy, you won't be the tin man needing the oil can. After a certain age, gravity starts pulling you toward the grave and the fight is on. And time is needed. And time is running out. Time extended needs time spent.

And you also need to stop sometimes; to sit and think; to watch TV; to read a book; to stare at the wall; to twiddle your thumbs; to remember all of those things you forgot to do and then run out to get them done...

...and brush your teeth and change the toilet paper roll and take out the trash for the old lady next door and mow the lawn and pay the bills and feed the fish and take your dad to the doctor and make dinner...

And then someone tells you to be "in the world but not of the world." You like the sound of that. So, how do you get out without leaving for good? No doubt, you want to live, but living is so full of...just...shit.

We need to fly above without permanently checking out. We all need to learn to ride the birches. We need it. But how? I'll tell you one thing: it ain't by getting lost in the crowd and burying yourself in its problems. That's living life in a foxhole, just waiting for the bomb to drop.